


Unfaithful

by samchandler1986



Category: GLOW (TV 2017)
Genre: AU/possible future fic, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-28 07:20:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22769968
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samchandler1986/pseuds/samchandler1986
Summary: If all they do is feel rather than think; if all they do is take from one another and never give; maybe it’ll be like this doesn’t count as cheating...
Relationships: Sam Sylvia/Ruth Wilder, mentions of Sam Sylvia/OC and Ruth/Russell
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43





	Unfaithful

They’ve been here before. 

It’s early in the afternoon; the time of cheats and adulterers he supposes. _Oh, it was a working lunch, honey_. Got to be up there with the old “working late tonight” uninspired excuse of choice for the unfaithful. He's following her up the stairs to her terrible little apartment, miserable and desperate. Wanting her just as much as he ever has and hating himself for it. Because they’ve been here before, and he knows in his bones they will again. He’s an addict when you get right down to it. Switching out the coke for sex—

—except it’s not that. Not really. Not _wholly_. It’s because the only time he really feels _alive_ anymore is when they’re together. And it’s not this part; when she shuts her front door and they reach for one another with such fierce hunger it scares him a little. It’s not her mouth pressed against his or the taste of her, as much as he wants it. It’s not even when they tear each other's clothes off and he fucks her hard and fast against the wall, like they’re on a four-minute countdown to the end of the world. If all they do is feel rather than think; if all they do is take from one another and never give; maybe it’ll be like this doesn’t count as cheating.

It’s the part that comes after all that. When they sink onto her couch and talk about what the fuck the studio needs to do next to keep afloat. When he tells her where Justine’s at with college, smoking an illicit cigarette, and she gives him the outline of her latest play. It’s the part where they’re half-working, all talking, and he remembers that he loves her so much his chest aches with it. When he realises that _this_ –this stolen time with Ruth– isn’t the infidelity after all. The real act of treason is when they leave and go back to their other lives.

*

“Are you fucking kidding me?” 

He shakes his head at the departure board covered in red lettering. Cancelled, delayed, delayed, cancelled. Bad weather rolling in over the Rockies, and now he is stuck here in fucking _Denver_ —

“Sam?”

He turns at the sound of his name in her voice; expecting it to be a trick of his imagination. It happens far too often, still. In the middle of the night sometimes, waking him in a cold sweat from vague nightmares he can’t fully recall—

But this time it’s not a dark fantasy. It really is Ruth standing in front of him, looking pretty much the same as she ever has. No make-up, but she doesn’t need it to make his heart ache softly. That old wound. 

Ruth might be the same as ever, but the two, almost three years it’s been since they last saw one another is told by the size of the kid at her side. He’d would say the boy has changed beyond recognition from the babe in arms he remembers, but the little face looking up at him is pretty fucking familiar. 

“Hey,” he manages, “hi. Hi Ruth.” 

“What’re you _doing_ here?” She sounds disbelieving rather than horrified.

“Uh, waiting for another connection back to LA, apparently.” He swallows, forcing himself not to look at the kid. “I was up in Boston. Justine’s finishing up at BU, so… Yeah. How about you… two?” 

“Um, pretty much the same actually. We were just visiting the grandparents.” She picks up her son. “Davey, this is Uncle Sam.”

Eyes, the same shade and shape as his own, stare saucer-wide. “Hey,” he says. “You know, we’ve actually met before, but I don’t think you’d remember.”

His miniature doppelganger continues to stare. “Uncle Sam came to visit just after you were born,” Ruth prompts. 

( _Because she’d done the Ruth-ish thing and told Russell, by that point, that there were good odds the kid she was carrying wasn’t his. And he’d done what Sam probably would’ve too, if their positions were reversed, and walked away to think about things. So Debbie was the one who held her hand while she laboured to bring David into this world, and Sam had come soon after with the stuffed bear and balloons and a desperate hope that somehow they might weave some fucking happily-ever-after out of threads of the melodrama before them._

 _It hadn’t worked out that way. A fortnight later and Russell was back, wanting to make their marriage work. And_ _Ruth had picked safe and stable and sensible over Sam. He gets that. And h_ _e’s worked hard in the intervening years not to drown in the bitterness over it. Now’s not the time to start that again.)_

“Do you… um, do you want to get some coffee or something while we wait?” she says. Just a hint of the old Ruth squeak in her voice, when she asks for what she really wants. 

And if he had any semblance of self-preservation instincts, he thinks, he’d politely decline. 

“Sure, Ruth,” he says softly instead. “That’d be nice.” 

*

Davey is fast asleep by the time they land at LAX. Small and light enough for Sam to pick up and carry on his shoulder through the terminal. Less than the weight of a camera, he thinks, as they hail a cab. 

Her duplex, when they get to it, is just like his. Shitty divorce written all over it. She tucks the kid into his bed while he admires the new trophies over the fireplace. Best screenplay, best teleplay, best new writer. Her life fell apart, again, and she built a better one from the ashes this time. Like Debbie, he suppose. And, to a lesser degree, himself.

She steps back into the room, uncertain for a moment as she looks up at him. “Um. Thanks for keeping us company today—”

He takes a step towards her and she closes her eyes, three years disappearing in a blink. He doesn't know what else to do but kiss her. Tentatively at first, until her mouth opens eager under his. That old hunger for one another is still right there under the surface, an addiction that never truly went away. She takes his hand and leads him to her bedroom without a word. Undressing him just like she used to, on those hazy afternoons and stolen evenings he still looks back on as some of the best times in his whole damn life. 

It feels almost like a dream, one he’s dreamt often enough. He’s a few pounds skinnier than he was back then, he knows. More lines of care on his face now, more grey in his hair. She winds her fingers into it just the same anyway as they kiss. His hands trace over her body. There are the faded marks of her pregnancy, traces of silver pale on her skin that are new to him. But the shape of her is exactly as he remembers. 

She sighs and arches into him and he pushes her down onto her bed. And this too is just like old times. Hard between her thighs, the blunt head of his cock finding her slick as he seeks entry. She hooks her legs around him, drawing back so she can watch his face, and he buries the length of himself inside her. Teasing her with almost withdrawal while he kisses her. Letting her hands grasp his hips, pull him back in deeper. The pattern repeats; he works in her until he's too close to his own climax to think anymore; until he spends himself with shuddering intensity. 

And afterwards they lie, holding on to one another tightly. Like they’re both scared the other will simply fly away if they let go. Like a dream on waking. 

*

“Are you gonna tell him?” 

They’re still lying in the grey blue dark together, hours later. Knowing he should leave soon and not wanting to; all too familiar a feeling.

“Tell…?” she frowns, always a terrible liar, ironically.

“Oh, c’mon Ruth, don't treat me like some fucking idiot. Davey. Are you gonna tell him he's my kid?”

She swallows. “Yes. I just wanted to, you know, write to you about it. So it wouldn’t come as a surprise this time if... If he wanted to talk to you later on.” 

He grits his teeth, trying not to think too hard about what it means; that the mothers of both of his children have hesitated to let him be a part of their lives in any meaningful way. Rosalie he understood, but Ruth... 

“I still have the same goddamn phone number,” he says. “You know, where we left things... I’m pretty damn sure if I remember telling you to call me—” 

"I know. I know! But, you know, I wasn’t sure if Rosie was still around, and I didn’t want to...to make things any worse than they already were...” 

“Yeah, well, funnily enough she packed up pretty quickly when I came clean about everything.” It still, even now, freights more relief than pain. Which makes him a pretty shitty person, he’s well aware.

“I’m sorry.” 

He shakes his head, unable to articulate how far beyond the need for an apology they’ve really travelled. “Me too,” he manages, eventually.

Silence falls between them. _So what now_ , he wants to say, but doesn’t dare. He strokes his hand down over her bare shoulder, her back, instead. It makes no fucking sense; what they’re left with here and now, after almost everything else has burned away. He has that old stupid nagging feeling. That this thing between them, that they both decided could never possibly last, turned out to be the most enduring in the long run. 

“Are you—” he starts, and loses his nerve.

“Am I...?”

“Are you both free this Sunday? You and the kid?”

“Yeah. I think so,” she says, breathy and cautious. “Why, what are you—?”

“D’you think you’d want to come over to mine for some dinner?”

He feels her pulse jump, they’re so entwined; her heartbeat through his ribs. What it means, though, he’s at a loss to—

“Yes,” she says, starting to smile. “I think we’d both like that very much.”

*

_And they live, eventually, and for the most part, happily ever after..._


End file.
